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Abstract
This study investigates how career hair and makeup artists (HMUs) in the elite film, television, theater, and opera gig economy sustain middle-class livelihoods amid a precarious labor market. Existing scholarship on creative labor often frames workers as either entrepreneurial members of the “creative class” or bohemian artists complicit in their own exploitation, a dichotomy that mirrors debate over whether nonstandard employment offers entrepreneurial opportunity or precarity. Drawing on Viviana Zelizer’s relational work framework, I analyze how HMUs leverage social and institutional relationships to nurture creative collaboration, stabilize wages, and secure employment benefits uncommon in gig work, expecting intrinsic artistic rewards and economic returns for their labor exchange. Data come from twenty interviews with veteran unionized HMUs, autoethnography, and archival analysis, comparing routine industry jobless cycles and prolonged unemployment during the pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes. Findings reveal that peer friendships are a key site of labor market exchange, where gig information and respect are currency, making relational and emotional labor vital to securing work. Success depends on both technical skill and the ability to curate a diverse portfolio of “scripted” (e.g., union contracts or long-term work friendships) and “unscripted” gigs (e.g., nonunion gigs or new work relationships), with the latter involving more negotiation and greater financial and emotional uncertainty. HMUs may end work relationships that fail to balance respect, trust, and artistic and economic reward, challenging portrayals of arts workers as passive in the face of exploitation. HMUs often strategically outsource relational work with producers to unions and labor law, brokering standard employment relationships, wages, and employer-earmarked benefits, mitigating precarity. However, recent boom-and-bust cycles have battered HMUs’ financial security and mental health, with no lateral career exit available, producing a form of “golden handcuffs” in formalized precarious work wherein the increasing lack of steady, reliable work offsets creative and economic rewards. This study adds to the literature on creative, precarious, and relational labor by describing middle-class precarity in show business and exploring the role of unions and legal brokerage of employment relationships in gig work.